Anyone watching the Republican Convention would think that entrepreneurship and innovation have been squashed and squandered by the Obama administration. Like most impressions coming out of political conventions, this one is also wrong and slanted toward making the president look bad.

Setting aside the Solyndra loan guarantee that went south, the stimulus package launched in the first year of Barack Obama's presidency has gone a long way toward advancing various clean energy technologies and improving traditional ones.

State energy officials marked a milestone of sorts in adding more solar power in the state. They hailed this achievement during a stakeholders' meeting this last week in Sacramento hosted by the state electric grid operator.

In the recent heat wave, California broke a record by generating more than 1,000 megawatts of solar-based power, equaling two average-size natural gas-fired generation plants. State officials are calling it historic.

Separately, there is a lot of solar not yet hooked up to the grid or existing in small rooftop installations on homes and businesses that isn't even counted in the state's milestones. (Rooftop solar has quadrupled in the city of Los Angeles in the past two years, for example.)

So, the combination of California's emphasis for the past 10 years on developing more alternatives and federal stimulus package incentives have produced more private-sector jobs and megawatts as the result.

It is true this power is not priced as low as traditional forms of electricity, but it makes sense for the long term if we as a society are going to seriously reduce carbon emissions that are choking the Earth's atmosphere. The added costs of over-reliance on coal-fired power are too much.

There are three large-scale solar plants now under construction in deserts of Southern California, totaling nearly another 1,000 megawatts. Each of them has been the recipient of the much-maligned Obama administration federal loan guarantees through the U.S. Department of Energy.

A project near the California- Nevada border off the Interstate 15 highway leading to Las Vegas, BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar development, is a $2.2 billion undertaking that has attracted more than a half-billion dollars of private equity, a $1.6 billion DOE loan guarantee and passed the halfway point in its construction early in August.

While the Obama administration stimulus has gotten criticized for increasing the federal deficit with few tangible results, Ivanpah has created more than 2,000 construction jobs, and promises to provide more than $400 million in local and state tax revenues and another $650million in wages and benefits over the 30-year expected life of the 370 megawatt power project.

According to Oakland-based BrightSource, the majority of the project's supply chain is being sourced domestically across 17 U.S. states, driving investments throughout the country and creating additional jobs in other areas that have been adversely affected by the economic downturn. It also uses its own patented technology that holds promise for other projects around the globe.

Does this sound like the result of the left-wing, socialist philosophy that Republicans are attaching to all things in the Obama administration?

Projects are getting done; innovation and technical advances are happening, and California is the center of the action - but no one in this election year seems to care. California, like the president, seems to be everybody's whipping boy, the poster child for all that's wrong with an entitlement-entrapped government system.

I would not try to argue that California is a model for fiscal or political success, any more than I can defend the too-slow economic growth the nation and the state have been experiencing. We can and will do better. But history teaches us that the way out of a near depression will not come quickly or easily.

That's why regardless of who wins the presidential election in November, the nation and the state need to stay the course on alternative energy. California is the nation's No. 1 solar producer. I think there is hope after all.

Richard Nemec is a Los Angeles writer covering energy for several national trade publications. He can be reached at: rnemec@ca.rr.com.